Monday, December 12, 2016

Trump Voters and The Drug Epidemic

Popular Economics Weekly

Why should so many rust-belt citizens vote for President-Elect Donald Trump,
who is patently against the interest of working class voters? I am speaking of
his promise to revoke Obamacare, which will make the 20-30 million dependent on
it poorer and sicker. And his selection of Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt to
run the EPA, who we know wants to roll back environmental regulations, making
everyone warmer, or House Speaker Ryan, who really wants to abolish Medicare as
we know it and turn it into a voucher plan.

A recent Penn
State study tells us why so many of the poorest and displaced white, blue
collar workers voted for him. It was the desperation of depressed families and
communities rampant with drug and alcohol abuse, in part from the loss of jobs
and the identities that went with holding a decent paying job, who would trust a
strong white male with authoritative tendencies who made enough pie-in-the-sky
promises more than a female President.

One can say that such desperation leads to an irrational kind of anger,
against anything that looks like the old order. Yet it was the old, white male
order that created both the Great Recession—because GW Bush’s trickle-down
economics cut regulations as well as taxes of the wealthiest, frittering away
the budget surpluses of President Clinton’s last 4 years in office—and
obstructed a robust recovery by opposing almost any stimulus spending, even
shutting down the government in 2011.

The Penn State study showed how hopeless was the situation to the inhabitants
now isolated from the modern multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-national economy.
Most of those industrial, high-paying blue collar jobs are gone, replaced by
high tech machines and little effort was made to replace them or rebuild those
communities.

The factory sector has been contracting since October 2014, but
has recently shown signs of strength. Factory orders surged 2.7 percent in
October. Both commercial and defense, were major positives, but the strength was
well distributed with the monthly gain excluding all aircraft at a very strong
0.7 percent.

"I think Trump's anti-free trade message resonated in these places and his
rhetoric was very simple -- Make America great again," Monnat said. "And you
have to understand that in some of these places that have experienced widespread
decline in manufacturing and extraction and the types of jobs that pay livable
wages, people there really feel like America is not so great anymore. I think
the message that he was the change candidate really resonated with people in
these places."

According to Swayne's article, the mortality rate from drugs, alcohol and
suicide is 36 deaths per 100,000 people in the least economically distressed
parts of the country. The rate is 49 deaths per 100,000 in the most economically
distressed areas.

There is now some hope for the rust belt if Trump can carry through on his
infrastructure rebuilding promise. After two years in contraction, factory
orders year-on-year rates are again positive, at 1.3 percent, and for shipments,
at 0.4 percent. October details included a useful 0.4 percent rise in shipments
and a 0.7 percent jump in unfilled orders that ended a long run of contraction
for this reading.

We hope the factory sector and manufacturing in general can recover in those
areas most affected by high addiction rates. The CDC reported in a 2007
report that more people now die from heroin overdose that gun homicides in
those same rust-belt areas. And opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015,
surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released
Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths
involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent
from 2014 to 2015.

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Harlan Russell Green, Editor/Publisher

Harlan Green is a Mortgage Broker in Santa Barbara, California since the 1980s and economist. As Editor/Publisher of PopularEconomics.com, he has published 3 weekly columns-- Popular Economics Weekly, Financial FAQs, and The Mortgage Corner-since 2000, and is a featured business columnist for Huffington Post. Please refer to the populareconomics.com website for further information.